Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Mike Mahoney, CEO of Boston Scientific a Marlborough, Mass.-based medical device company, said the company derived about 10% of its total sales from emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China during the 3-months ended Sept. 30, 2014 — an 18% increase from the same period in 2013.

Mass Device reports that Boston Scientific is looking double its emerging markets presence over the next 2 years as it seeks to catch up with larger competitors; therefore expanding its presence in emerging markets is one of five strategic imperatives Mahoney said the company is putting forward in 2015 and beyond.

Bloomberghas ranked the incidence of stress in the lives of people in 74 countries of the world. Seven equally weighted variables were considered in the rankings: annual homicide rates, GDP per capita on a purchasing-power-parity basis, income inequality, corruption perception, unemployment, urban air pollution, and life expectancy.

Life is most stressful in Nigeria which was ranked #1, Pakistan was at #7, India at #14, China at #29 and the U.S. at #54. The least stressed country was Norway at #74. Only countries with data available for all seven variables were included. Find your country in the graphic below:

India’s 500 MWe Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalapakkam in Tamil Nadu missed its September 2014 deadline for first criticality, and will be commissioned in 2015 reported Jitendra Singh, minister of state for space and atomic energy.

Erection of all major components of the reactor has been completed. Commissioning of auxiliary systems such as the safety service water systems, emergency service water systems, ventilation, electrical and gas systems have been completed. The next stage in commissioning is preheating and filling of sodium into the secondary and primary systems. The project achieved an overall physical progress of 98% at the end of June 2014.

“Being the first of its kind reactor being built completely indigenously in our country, some delays on account of the requirement of rigorous testing and qualification of all major equipment and sub-systems are anticipated,” said Singh.

The PFBR is a sodium-cooled pool-type fast reactor. It is the first unit of the second stage of India’s original three-stage program of nuclear development. The first step was natural uranium-fueled Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors and the third step envisages thorium-based advanced heavy water reactors. India has one of the world’s largest reserves of thorium and is keen to exploit the mineral for clean energy production.

“500 million people will be coming online over the next three to four years on inexpensive smartphones,” said Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-American academic and entrepreneur. “This will create an Internet revolution that will make our (American) dot-com boom seem lame.” These soon-to-be connected consumers are also young — making them an ideal e-commerce target.

By 2050, India is expected to be the most populated country with the largest economy, according to Pew. Half of its 1.25 billion residents are currentlyunder the age of 25 — and by 2020, India is set to become the world’s youngest country with an average age of 29.

Microsoft has tuned into this. This month, the company announced plans to bring free Internet access to India with three data centers throughout the country. CEO Satya Nadella said the company sees a large opportunity in the Indian market. According to Sharad Sharma, an angel investor based in Bangalore, the majority of India’s startup talent is coming from the country’s multinational R&D centers such as Google, HP and Cisco. As cloud-based solutions have grown, the need for these IT hubs has slowed. This has many Indian entrepreneurs leaving the corporate world and launching startups. Venture capital funding to Indian startups is up 261% from 2013, totaling $3.86 billion to date, according to PrivCo which trackes private company financial intelligence based from New York.

“Employees are starting to feel stagnation as parent companies slow down,” said Sharma. “Essentially, these employees are going from building global software products for [corporations] to building them for their own startups.”

Piyush Goyal is the current Minister of State with Independent Charge for Power, Coal, and New & Renewable Energy in the Government of India. A graduate of law and accountancy, Goyal was a management consultant and an investment banker before he became a full-time politician. He has participated in Leadership Programs at Yale University (2011), and Princeton University (2013).

Piyush Goyal

At the India Economic Summit held in the first week of November in New Delhi, Goyal declared that government-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) was looking to double its production of coal to a billion tonnes in the next five years. CIL had a large initial public offering of shares in 2010 and is among India’s most valuable companies by market capitalization. It produces about 80% of India’s coal.

Goyal, who is also minister for New and Renewable Energy, said a “huge investment opportunity” of nearly $250 billion beckons in the energy sector over the next four to five years, including $100 billion in renewables and $50 billion in transmission and distribution. “I see investments also coming into wind (energy) with the re-introduction of the fiscal benefits that were earlier available,” he said. In the area of solar energy in particular, Indian manufacturers have asked for the scrapping of the inverted duty structure, whereby finished goods are taxed at lower rates than imported raw materials. The government has been looking to resolve this issue since it hampers manufacturers in the solar energy sector, Goyal promised at the Summit.

“This government is sincere in giving electrical power to all Indian citizens,” the minister added. Emphasizing that renewable sources of energy are one of the thrust areas of the government, Goyal said his ministry was eager to expand solar energy production in India to 100 GW by 2019.

Prime Minister Modi, has made a commitment to bring uninterrupted power to all India’s people — a key plank of his government’s program. To achieve that, Goyal said, India needed to rapidly raise the amount of coal it mined for power generation, cut back on electricity lost on transmission lines and through theft, and promote the use of renewable resources such as solar and wind energy. Coal, which generates about three-fifths of the country’s energy, would retain an “essential role” in India’s energy mix, as in the United States.

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About Gunjan

Gunjan Bagla is the founder and Managing Director of Amritt, Inc. His book, "Doing Business in 21st Century India: How to Profit Today from tomorrow’s most exciting Market" was published in 2008 by Warner/Hachette Books.